Okay, public health experts have known this for a while — see Life-cycle study [Epstein et al]
: Accounting for total harm from coal would add “close to 17.8¢/kWh of electricity generated.”
The actual social cost of carbon today is at least 5 times that price and more than 10 times that in the near future (or now, see here
). As but one example, the relatively Conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) noted back in 2008 that
just to stabilize at 550 ppm, which would likely still be catastrophic for humanity, you’d need a price of “$90/tonne of CO2 in 2030,” which is to say $330 a metric ton of carbon. You need a 2030 CO2 price of “$180/tonne in the 450 Policy Scenario” — $660 a metric ton of carbon.
And let’s not forget the work of Martin Weitzman on the impact of even a small chance of catastrophic impacts — see Harvard economist: Climate cost-benefit analyses [like Nordhaus's] are “unusually misleading,” warns colleagues “we may be deluding ourselves and others.”
The fact is that on our business as usual emissions path, we have a very high chance of catastrophic impacts, not the 3% or so chance Weitzman estimates (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts
And yet Nordhaus and company still find that the total damages from natural gas exceed its value-added at a low-ball carbon price of $27 per ton!
At a price of $65 a ton of carbon, the total damages from natural gas are more than double its value-added!
And so once again the literature makes clear that a massive ramp up of natural gas ain’t the solution to global warming – as many 2011 analyses
have found, including the IEA’s
. Needless to say, if natural gas does more harm than good, you can imagine how bad coal is.